Queensland is going to welcome the world in 2032. But where's the welcome for stranded Aussies?
Queensland is gearing up to celebrate news that we will welcome the world at the 2032 Olympics. But this state appears less welcoming to thousands of stranded Aussies, who blame our Premier for making their plight worse, writes Keith Woods.
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SO the Olympics are coming to Queensland. Because the Premier went to Tokyo.
We should celebrate the fact that this state will, in just over a decade’s time, welcome the world.
It’s always hard to predict the future, but already one expects it will be a far grander affair than the Japanese version, which has been hit with multiple Covid-19 cases, a rape allegation and claims an outside swimming venue “smells like a toilet” because it is beset with sewage.
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is no doubt taking notes from her Tokyo hotel room. She will have even more time for reflection when she returns to Queensland and tastes the humdrum existence of a hotel quarantine guest.
Might this column be so bold as to suggest some light reading for Ms Palaszczuk to help her while away the hours?
Like the story of Donna Lewis. Ms Lewis is from the other Coast, the Sunshine one. Ms Palaszczuk will know it – it’s where a wedding party had their hotel booking cancelled just three days before the ceremony so an NRL team could be accommodated.
Ms Lewis is not an NRL player, a movie star, or someone IOC grandees wish to eyeball, so is finding it a little harder to make her way to Queensland.
Instead, she is someone who flew to the UK in February to be with her dying father in his final days. Her return ticket was cancelled after the overseas arrivals cap was halved at Ms Palaszczuk’s insistence, and now she is stuck.
“I haven’t seen my husband for five months, haven’t seen my children for five months and there’s no real saying when I will get back,” she told the BBC.
She has since been quoted $14,000 for a one-way ticket.
“I have been told it will be the beginning of September, but the flights and the price to get home in September are just extortionate.”
Ms Palaszczuk might also consider reading the story of former Gold Coast resident Phillip Burchett, whose stepson was one of 202 people killed in the Bali bombings in 2002.
Having lost his job as an executive chef at a Bali restaurant due to the pandemic, and unable to book a flight home, Mr Burchett was recently jailed for three weeks for overstaying his visa.
“I just want to go to Australia where I can get work, make my kids happy and keep them safe,” he said.
A more uplifting read is the story of Tweed Heads couple Jake Shepherd and Tamara Ilic – although it too speaks to the lengths Aussies are going to in order to get home.
After enduring months of cancelled flights as they tried to get back from Panama, the pair hatched a plan to sail home instead.
Their trip across the Pacific has been frequently hair-raising, but they’ve made it as far as Fiji and hope to reach these shores soon.
This column trusts Ms Palaszczuk will have a smoother trip home. Goodness knows she could do with it, having recently shared that she finds her job “stressful” and invited people to “come and take a walk in my shoes”.
The 14 days in hotel quarantine will hopefully give her a chance to clear the mind. To read a little. To catch up on how it is in other people’s shoes.
Slashing the international arrivals cap was a cruel blow to many. Crueller still when they can see that the likes of Matt Damon, Tom Hanks, and even Z-list Big Brother contestants like Katie Hopkins are exempt.
It is wonderful that Queensland will host the Olympics. But before we welcome the world, we should make a more serious effort to welcome our own home first.
JULY 7: REASON IT'S RIGHT PREMIER GOES TO TOKYO
TO go or not to go? It’s a question facing Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, amid heated calls for her to cancel any plans she might have to represent Queensland at the Olympic Games in Tokyo.
At time of writing, more than 40,000 people had signed an online petition demanding that Border Force deny her an exemption to travel abroad – as they did to more than 10,000 other applicants in June alone.
The demand is being driven by the fact the Queensland government led calls for a halving of the number of overseas arrivals allowed into Australia, which the federal government gutlessly caved in to last week.
Bulletin readers objecting to Ms Palaszczuk’s planned trip pointed to a possible double standard.
“Why should government officials be given privileges over others that haven’t been able to see their own families?” wrote one. “Why should she be allowed travel when many can’t even cross a border within this country?”
Another suggested she “Zoom like the rest of us”.
The objectors are wrong.
The Olympics are going to be a very big deal for Queensland. There are dollars and jobs on the line. If the Premier can travel safely to Tokyo for the announcement about the awarding of the 2032 games, it is only right that she should be there.
And because Ms Palaszczuk is fully vaccinated, she is unlikely to carry Covid home as an unwanted souvenir.
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But the anger of objectors is driven by a sense that there is one rule for them, and another for the rest of us, and in this they are right.
Witness the comments of Deputy Premier Steven Miles at a fiery press conference during last week’s lockdown.
“It turns out the only thing that’s required to get a permit from the federal government to leave the country is proof that you have a meeting in another country, proof that you have a business meeting,” Mr Miles said.
“It’s not good enough that just because you can afford a business class flight or a charter flight you can breach our closed international borders.
“It’s not good enough that the borders are open for the Prime Minister’s corporate mates but closed for the rest of us, putting Queenslanders at risk.”
The Prime Minister’s corporate mates, taking business class flights to, of all things, business meetings? Translated from the language of May Day rallies, what we are talking about here is people seeking to do deals that bring investment and jobs into this country.
Mr Miles sees this as some kind of outrage. But he sees no problem with Ms Palaszczuk travelling to spruik Queensland’s Olympics bid for similar reasons.
It’s hypocrisy, yes, but it also points to something more disturbing – the capture of too much of Queensland Labor by elements of the extreme left.
Mr Miles also whined at considerable length last week about Queensland’s quarantine hotels filling to bursting point, implying it was Mr Morrison’s “corporate mates” who were primarily to blame.
What the Deputy Premier failed to mention is that panic-stricken Queensland is one of the few states in the country that requires travellers from Covid hot spots within Australia to quarantine at a hotel for 14 days. In Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania, people returning from such places interstate can complete their 14 days quarantine at home.
But not in Queensland. The result is that up to 150 people a day have been confined to hotel rooms here since greater Sydney was declared a hotspot on June 24 who have not set foot outside the country.
It’s in this context that people are getting angry about Ms Palaszczuk’s proposed travel.
But stopping Ms Palaszczuk from going to Tokyo would be cutting off the nose to spite the face. Instead, we should wish her well on her journey – and welcome the useful precedent it would set.
We don’t need to ground the Premier. What we need is a similar reasonable approach for the rest of us.
JUNE 1: ‘Disgusting, out of touch’ - What Premier once said about pollie pay hikes
HOW do you know a politician has been in power for too long?
They pocket a massive pay rise.
So it is with the Queensland state government, which is happily accepting a recommendation that all 93 members of parliament deserve not just one pay rise, but three.
The Queensland independent Remuneration Tribunal on Monday decided MPs will now get a 2 per cent pay increase in September, another 2.25 per cent increase in March next year, followed by another pay hike of 2.5 per cent in September 2022.
The rises will take Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s salary from a mere $399,955 to $427,561, making her the second-highest paid premier in the country, just a shade behind that other noted “socialist” Dan Andrews.
Her deputy, the ever-charming Steven “c-word” Miles, will pocket an extraordinary $376,069.
On the opposition side, LNP leader David Crisafulli will see his annual pay packet bumped up to $350,324.
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In accepting the independent tribunal’s generous offer, Ms Palaszczuk appears to be declaring the Covid-19 pandemic is finished. How so? In the lead-up to the state election last year, she wrote to the tribunal asking it to “put on hold” pay rises for MPs for the pandemic’s duration.
Just nine months on from the fear election, when the spectre of Covid was invoked to spook the voters at every turn, doesn’t it just gladden the heart to know it’s all over?
There is, of course, an argument to be made that running a state is no small business. That it requires the best and the brightest, and that great minds will not be prised from other well-rewarded roles without great salaries to match.
Has that been delivered?
It’s not for this column to say.
But it might be worth asking the patients forced to wait hours at overcrowded hospitals, or the medical staff working themselves into the ground in those conditions.
One might also ask some of the 3173 Gold Coast families on the social housing register, many of whom are forced to couch-surf or sleep in cars.
Or the 25,800 people unemployed in this city - giving the Gold Coast an unemployment rate of 7.2 per cent, well above the national average.
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Here’s another interesting little titbit to ponder: while we’ll soon have the second highest-paid premier, ABS statistics show Queensland has the third-lowest average wage of all states and territories.
Yet Ms Palaszczuk and her team think they’re worth this massive pay increase.
One can well imagine what Ms Palaszczuk, as opposition leader, might have said if her predecessor as premier, Campbell Newman, was in line for an increase.
Actually, we don’t have to imagine. Here’s what Ms Palaszczuk said in July 2013 about Newman government plans to give MPs and ministers a whopping pay rise.
“There are people who are out there battling, there are people out there struggling,” she said.
“We’ve seen massive cuts to the health sector. We’ve seen people having to pay for their children’s medical supplies, we’ve seen cuts to the disability sector, this is a government that has made these cuts.
“This government is not in line with community expectations. This is a government that is completely out of touch. The whole thing is disgusting, the whole thing needs to be looked at again.”
Ms Palaszczuk won an incredible victory in the state election in January 2015 battling against the Newman government’s hubris.
But it now appears that the worm has turned. That the current government has become what it once despised. That it’s been in power too long.
How do we know? They’re about to pocket a massive pay rise.
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